Nadda likely to succeed Shah as new BJP president

New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is set to get its new national president in place of Amit Shah on Monday, with its working president J P Nadda expected to be elected to the post unopposed.

Top party leaders, including Union ministers and those
from states, are likely to arrive at the BJP headquarters to file nominations
in support of Nadda, who has long been seen as the choice of Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and Shah for the job.

Nadda’s decades-long experience in the organisation,
starting from student politics, proximity to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) and clean image are seen as his strengths.

Shah held a meeting with senior party leaders, including
several Union ministers and chief ministers of the party-ruled states, on
Sunday evening.

Though there was no official communication about what
transpired, sources said the party leaders deliberated over the details of the
election exercise.

Senior BJP leader Radha Mohan Singh, who is in charge of the
party’s organisational poll process, said that nominations for the national
president’s election will be filed on January 20, and a contest will take place
the next day, if required.

The BJP has the convention of electing its president with
consensus and without any contest, and there is little possibility that it will
be any other way this time.

The election of a new president will bring to end
incumbent Shah’s tenure of over five-and-a-half years during which the BJP
expanded its footprints across the country like never before and enjoyed its
best phase in electoral contests despite suffering a few setbacks in state
polls.

With Shah joining the Modi 2.0 government as Home
Minister, the BJP began the exercise for electing his successor as the party
has the convention of ‘one person, one post’.

Nadda was appointed as the party’s working president in
July last year in an indication that the Himachal Pradesh leader was the likely
choice for the top organisational job.

In the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha election, he was
in-charge of the BJP’s election campaign in the politically-crucial state of
Uttar Pradesh, where the party faced a tough challenge from the grand alliance
of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The party won 62 out
of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.

Having risen through the saffron ranks, Nadda has long
been a member of the BJP parliamentary board, its highest decision making body.
He had served as a minister in the first Modi government.’